Nelson Mandela admitted to hospital for 'routine tests'

JOHANNESBURG (BNO NEWS) -- Former South African President Nelson Mandela was admitted to Johannesburg's Milpark hospital for 'routine tests' on Wednesday, the Nelson Mandela Foundation said.

"We can confirm that Mr. Mandela is at Milpark hospital undergoing routine tests. He is in no danger and is in good spirits," said Sello Hatang, a spokesperson for the Foundation. Hatang did not specify why Mandela was hospitalized.

And while the spokesperson said Mandela is in no danger, speculation has erupted about his condition. Earlier in the week, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the South African Press Association (SAPA) that Mandela was "frail."

"He was all right, I mean he's 92, man, you know. And he's frail," Tutu said.

Mandela, who served as president of South Africa from 1994 until 1999 and became internationally known as a figure of the anti-apartheid movement, is 92 years old. He released a book entitled "Conversations with Myself" last year and was sold in 22 editions and 20 languages.

The book opened with a foreword by U.S. President Barack Obama who wrote that Mandela is a "great inspiration." Parts of the book, which presents a more human Mandela, was compiled by the Nelson Mandela Foundation's Center of Memory and Dialogue. It is aimed to give readers access to the person behind the public figure: from letters written in the darkest hours of Mandela's twenty-seven years of imprisonment to the draft of an unfinished sequel to his autobiography 'Long Walk to Freedom.'

"Here he is making notes and even doodling during meetings, or recording troubled dreams on the desk calendar of his cell on Robben Island; writing journals while on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle or conversing with friends," Hatang said last year before the release of the book. "In these pages he is neither an icon nor a saint; here he is like you and me."

((BNO NEWS) )